Category Archives: Quote of the Day

Ken @ Popehat, in a very good post related to general nanny-state-ism and the potential legalization/decriminalization of prostitution:

I think that if you are going to tell someone what they can or can’t do for their own good, you ought to hear what they have to say about it, and look them in the eye when you tell them.

It’s part of a wider point about seeing the individual, not just the abstraction, when you start talking about public policy. Some people have the courage of their convictions to look someone in the face — possibly someone they love or care about — and tell them “if you do X, you deserve to go to jail”. But most don’t. Most can’t get to know someone and then still threaten them with a jail sentence for a victimless crime. It’s a lot easier to make an abstract decision in a voting booth about abstract “groups” of people, and it’s something that we all need to guard against. Public policy decisions affect very real people in very concrete ways; they are not merely abstract principles.

“If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these [Snowden] documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world – when they prevent the Bolivian President’s plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today – all they do is helpfully underscore why it’s so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.”

– Glenn Greenwald writing in response to his partner David Miranda’s 9 hour detention by UK authorities at Heathrow Airport.

Note that the second and third charges both require the feds to prove that Snowden’s release of information to the press was harmful to the United States. This puts our government in the position of attempting to prove that it is harmful to release accurate information about how it is spying on us, and how it is misleading us about spying on us.

Espionage charges usually describe someone with classified information leaking that information to powers hostile to the United States government.